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Building A Community Wireless Network From Scratch
adelayde writes "This summer I've been involved in a project to build a community-orientated wireless network in the city of Bristol, England. Recently I published an article ( mirrored here and here) describing what we have achieved so far, including some interesting thoughts on passive repeaters. There is a supporting site (mirrored here) with detailed instructions on how to build antennae, and the main project web site is also available here. A bit of own trumpet blowing perhaps, but I think it'll be of interest to those readers involved in similar projects and be of some help to those thinking of starting their own."
I would love to see more of these sites stress the importance of securing therse type of networks. All-in-all a good read.
Lots of articles appear on slashdot about ISPs monitoring communications for the government, shutting sites down without authorization or anything resembling due process (important if you are a US citizen!), operating system and software vendors restricting freedoms, abuses of media by government PsyOps (ack!) organizations, media conglomerates manipulating editorials, ad nauseum.
While all of that may or may not be true, there is now a technology that can greatly reduce the reliance of the technically inclined and general populace alike on these large, controlled networks. This is the first time in history that a viable, high bandwidth technology can be bought into for a hundred bucks and some clever thought. The signifigance of that is not immediately apparent now, but I suspect it will become VERY important in the years to come.
If you really care about getting shafted by your ISP and care about free speech this is a avenue to pursue in addition to your standard channels of protest. Set up local networks! Once upon a time, we did this with modems, call forwarding lines, and crummy XTs. A bunch of kids trading software provoked national secret service investigations. Not with the internet, but with long distance phone calls. 802.11 is making being a ham radio operator interesting again - I can play with antennas and build networks on the cheap! At 11mbits to boot! When I was in high school, I thought the kenwood handheld and a battery operated packet modem was pretty pimp - and it cost me a lot more than a d-link pcmcia card!
If you live in a high density area, look at getting together a co-op for bandwidth. Distribute it on WiFi. Get people together and pool some cash. The networks are there, and once they're built, they only have to be connected. There is no reason that in 5 years, there can't be an alternative to commercial ISPs for bandwidth. Just as nobody thought the internet would work (what! no circuits! no central provide!), there is no evidence a widely distributed decentralized wireless network won't, either.
Security is a non starter. Make the network all-encompassing and encrypt your traffic.
Combine the technologies with something like Freenet (freenetproject.org), and you have a real motivator for social change (like it or not). Run more static nodes!
My $0.02. 802.11 isn't hyped enough.
..don't panic
I wish they would replace the current network in the dorms at UAH with something like this, that way if you are using your laptop in the UC you can stay connected. Also, anything would better than the current network; I've even thought of paying the extra money to get the increased speed and reliability of dialup.
Really nothing to do about wireless networks, but more about this submitted article.
:-) Well there is the bandwidth bill I suppose. hehe
If you are submitting your own site to slashdot, this is how you should do it! Have a couple mirrors handy so we can actually take a look at what you posted.
Kudos to this guy! There really should be some kinda of prize.
I would assume the Cable and DSL companies would be kinda pissed seeing everyone's money go to a wireless ISP with a T3 not through their wired lines. And since they have the bigger bank it means the little guys (dispite their good intentions) can get hurt real bad in battle
I don't think they'd mind a wireless ISP with a T3, because a T3 still costs quite a bit of money. From the perspective of an ISP, a wireless or wired service looks the same if it has a T3, they don't care what happens beyond the router at the ISP itself. What they would object to is running a "community" ISP off of domestic ADSL lines. No matter what your "good intentions", ADSL is as cheap as it is because of calculations done by the telcos of how many potential paying customers there are per exchange. If suddenly there are far fewer paying customers because everyone's piggybacking on a few who do pay (even if those people do give their service away voluntarily) then the price of ADSL will have to go up by a proportional amount. Imagine what happens if instead of 10 paying ADSL customers an telco gets 1 and 9 sharing it - ADSL will have to become 10x more expensive for those that do pay, and then will they be so willing to give it away for free?
The technology works - 512k down is a lot of bandwidth for sporadic network loads like web browsing and reading email (less for streaming video and file downloads, sure). Wireless access points are cheap, 802.11b PCMCIA cards are cheap, DHCP and no WEP means that administration costs are trivial. But the economics don't, and so-called community ISPs are going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, if they're not careful.
Being from Bristol (UK), an early wireless adopter and a computing student, this article was very interesting.
:-)
However, I'm going to be very cynical and say that I don't see the point. What you have effectively done is split a product that costs >=£100 per month (2Mb ADSL) between 4 people. Individually it would cost those 4 people £20 each (512k ADSL for £19.99 per month).
While I think the project is a great excuse for the use of interesting technology, on such a small scale it's ultimately pointless.
The current aim of the project is feeble: "the aim was to prove that a portion of this connection could be successfully shared between a number of local residents or community groups by using wireless technology". Well, I could have saved you a lot of time and effort and told you it was possible
To make the project of any use (imho), it either needs to be far more widespread than it is (as you suggest, explore into other parts of Bristol), and approach Bristol City Council directly for funding/support, or there needs to be some benefit for those using it on a small scale, that there otherwise could not be. Simply giving 4 users ~512Kb/sec each isn't much benefit.
I'm pretty sure this might get moderated as a troll (if moderated at all) but that isn't the intention. Coming from where the article is based, it's hard not to get personal about the details - and although this project has a lot of potential, it seems to be in a very unevolved state.
Jonathan Love
Hi,
As many people will no doubt find out as they scale up their wireless networks, 802.11b is the wrong protocol for large public networks.
You should be using straight 802.11.
The difference is that, although 802.11 runs at only 3Mbps and 802.11b runs at 11Mbps, 802.11 has guranteed bandwidth, whereas 802.11b is not guranteed.
Most community users, when given access to anything better than 56kbps, want to stream video, download large games and do all the usual bandwidth-intensive stuff.
The upshot is that 802.11b networks choke in situations with hundreds of concurrent users, whereas 802.11 does not.
Add to that poor signal attenuation and vulnerability to interference, and 802.11b does not look too hot.
With the newly announced potential to transmit 802.11b up to 4 miles away, this is worrying.
Add to that the fact that large-capacity 802.11 networks have the ability to knock out 802.11b networks completely and you can see some interesting implications.
How about your local community wireless network being knocked out by a large ISP so that they can sell their 802.11 accounts?
Believe me, it's already happening.